In the summer of 2015, I have finally graduated from university. The next thing for me was moving back into my parent’s house. My room there doesn’t really feel like mine anymore, as I have been absent from it for the last 4 years, only using the place as storage and for sleep whenever I visit. During my time in university, I have learned a number of things about me, about my family, and about people. Long story short, my room as it was, is an unacceptable living environment. Prior to moving back, I took it upon myself as a designer to update and makeover the room.

The first task was repairing all the holes and cracks on the walls. After that, I proceeded to strip down all of the paint around the frames of doors and windows. My idea was to introduce more color, a sense of nature, and also highlight the geometry of the room itself.

Working from morning to late-night, manually stripping down the layers of paint was a tedious task that took many days.

Once all of the paint are removed, I then had to restore the wood. I did so by sanding the surface down and then applying a few coats of semi-gloss polyurethane.

Looking good so far if I can say so myself! Due to time constraints, I was not aiming for perfection but a decent level of quality I find acceptable. Preferably, I would strip down more areas of paint if I had other people to help me.

A close-up look at one of the window sill. This is prior to the polyurethane coating.

Due to all the sanding, the wood dust gets on the walls and gets caught on spider webs. Once all of the paint stripping and wood sanding was done, the walls were wiped clean and the floor vacuumed to clean up the numerous paint chips. For some reason, the posts of the door frame is a different wood from the lintel. The problem could be fixed by staining the wood to match their color, but I am not experienced enough to pick the right stains, so I left them the way they were.

Before moving onto painting, I had order some new curtains, so here I am trying them out. They are not so much as curtains as they are just sheers. You can see the outside quite easily. I also purchased some sheets of privacy window films and other sheers with floral themes to go along with these, so that’s not a problem.

For the window on the side, I had purchased a plastic film with leaf decorations. This window faces west and the light during the evening as the sun sets is often quite uncomfortable. The film itself will scatter the light evenly while the color of it will help reduce the glaring bright orange.

As you can see from the photo on the right, I opened the window slightly after applying the film on to compare, and the difference is quite dramatic. With this, the comfort of the light at day will stay more constant.

Finally, I move onto painting the room anew. The difference between the new and old paint is as clear as night and day.

The painting for all of the walls are finished and just the ceiling remains. However, I didn’t want to live in a room with just white all around.

So I painted the ceiling in an orange color. Normally, you shouldn’t paint the ceiling in anything other than white, because it will heavily affect the way the room lights up, but I didn’t find any of the walls in the room fitting to be in another color, so I opted for the ceiling. Orange isn’t that bad since it will just make the lighting in the room a little warmer.

I also painted this small section under the windows as an accent.

With the painting all done, this is how it looks. Since I took this photo at night and without curtains, it looks a bit gloomy.

Adding the curtains and window films this is how everything looks as a whole during the day. Personally, I think that the extra bit of color looks wonderful and the all the colors complement each other well. The curtains are double layered with the sheers you saw earlier and with another light green sheer with floral imprints.

Lastly, I got some new furniture to build and slowly organized all the stuff for my new room.

That’s pretty much it for the process of my room makeover. It went from a dirty ugly place to a much more vibrant and comfortable living environment. It was a lot of work and even tedious at times to do everything written above by myself, but it was well worth the effort and time. Once everything in my room is all organized and set up, let’s meet again.